Remember the fuss about ENO’s previous production of Don Giovanni – the one by Calixto Bieito which featured all manner of sexual excess and Tarantinoesque nastiness? Well, its successor, directed by Rufus Norris, is pretty much the same, only not half so offensive or brilliantly staged.

Don G emerges yet again as a callous yob, with a greasy drunk of a Leporello as his sidekick, pursued by a screaming hellcat of an Elvira and a Zerlina and Masetto straight out of Corrie. Ian MacNeil’s sets and Nicky Gillbrand’s costumes fix a distinctly tatty, modern urban look: the Don’s final banquet, for example, is a takeaway eaten out of a plastic bag.

Of a code of class and honour, of the deceptive gentlemanliness of Don G, of the human or divine moral order against which the Don’s descent to damnation should seem all the more shocking, there is not a glimpse. If you believe that Don Giovanni is nothing more than a brutal nihilistic mess, then you’ll love this. I don’t, and I didn’t.

The performance disappointed musically, too. Kirill Karabits’s conducting was curiously muted and sapless – he seemed afraid of the score’s grandeur, and with nothing given any urgency, the absence of dynamism generated in the pit meant that the cast never cohered.

Iain Paterson took the title role. His singing is exemplary in its warmth and ease (the Serenade was crooned beautifully dolcissimo), he is an intelligent actor and his delivery of the text was crystalline. But the character’s electric energy and erotic charisma wasn’t suggested.

Katherine Broderick has a big and vibrant, if somewhat undisciplined, dramatic soprano, and she made a good fist of Anna’s arias. Like her Ottavio, Robert Murray, she bravely endured the indignities inflicted upon her by the director.

The others fitted Norris’s concept more readily. Brindley Sherratt made Leporello’s catalogue aria one of the evening’s highlights, presenting Elvira (Sarah Redgwick, an excellent last-minute substitute for an ailing Rebecca Evans) with a slide show charting Don G’s conquests by timeline rather than geographic location – Jeremy Sams’s smart translation rose to the challenge here. Sarah Tynan and newcomer John Molloy shone brightly as Zerlina and Masetto, too: I bet we’ll be hearing more of Molloy.

But with this unappealing production following close on a duff Così and Idomeneo, Mozart isn’t having a happy time at the Coliseum.